This is not my first time reading Paul Hendrickson's SEMINARY: A SEARCH (1983). I first read it more than thirty years ago, and I remember being so moved and excited by it that I just had to share it. So I sent it to a friend who had gone through the minor seminary experience with me, back in 1958. I was fourteen, my friend was still only thirteen, when we were packed off to a boarding school, St Joseph's Seminary, about 75 miles from our hometown, to begin our studies for the priesthood. It was the same year that Paul Hendrickson left his Illinois home, the same age as I, traveling by car, train, and bus to a seminary situated in a remote rural area in Alabama.

There's a huge difference between my experience and Hendrickson's, however. I lasted only a single year at St Joe's. In fact, I was so homesick an unhappy after only a month or two that I was ready to go home, but my father insisted I finish what I had started, so I finished out the year before returning to my hometown to complete high school. Hendrickson, on the other hand, stayed in the seminary system for seven years, leaving near the end of his novitate, a confused and unhappy 'man-boy' at the age of 21. But even so, I could relate, because the atmosphere of that all-male prep school environment he describes rings truer than true.

Hendrickson's descriptions of the rigorous regimen of classwork, study, prayer and blow-off-steam athletics and recreation brought back so many memories of my single year in the seminary. And there was the open-bay barracks-like freshman dorm with its enforced grand silence every night. And, when he describes a twisted sexual practice presided over by his priest 'spiritual director,' I was reminded of an ugly little gnome of a man at St Joe's, a monsignor whose room was just outside of our dorm, who was said to prey on the smaller freshmen. All of the seminarians seemed to know about him, a tacitly acknowledged sexual predator, who foreshadowed the pedophilia scandals that wracked the Church in later years. But there are good experiences too. The close friendships molded between the boys who stayed and returned year after year. The study habits inculcated by the killer schedules served us all well in future schools. And the religion too. Because, as the book's subtitle implies, Hendrickson continued to search for his place in the Church for years after he left the seminary in 1965, a search that perhaps finds a kind of closure in this book.

It is obvious that SEMINARY was a labor of love, because Hendrickson spent literally years in researching and writing the book, conducting countless interviews with former classmates and teachers, travelling across the country to find these people, engaging in voluminous correspondence and researching the origins and history of the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. He began his studies in a cobbled together set of old wooden buildings in the Alabama woods, but two years later the seminary moved to a near palatial new campus of brick, glass and steel in Virginia, and, with the advent of Vatican II changes a couple years later, things were never quite the same. And not just in his seminary, but in the Catholic Church in general.

In the years that he spent putting this book together, Hendrickson had occasion to attend a reunion of former seminarians at the original Alabama campus, where one of his former teachers, Father Vincent, spoke to the forty or so attendees -

"He said he had been listening carefully to our various stories that day - where we'd been, whom we'd married, how many kids we had, our jobs. 'And what I'm hearing are the values that DID take root. There are spiritual values that grew up here at Holy Trinity and did NOT die. There was something beautiful that went out of Holy Trinity. It was you. It was you.' Then he said, so softly it was easy to miss. 'Forgive us if we missed you. But you see, we were sorry for your departure.' I didn't get it right away, but I think he was expressing his own regret and maybe a small apology for all that had flowed on between us, for some misunderstandings and wrecked dreams."

Because, as evidenced by the stories Hendrickson tells of his former classmates, and how their later lives went, there were indeed wrecked dreams, bitterness, and loss of faith. This is a beautiful book, told with a kind of longing that indicates Hendrickson's search goes on; it's not over.

And I get that. Even my one-year experience in a seminary left me with a lot of questions, a life-long curiosity about the Church, about all those changes that began in the sixties. I still remember reading some early books about the results of those changes - Gabriel Longo's SPOILED PRIEST (1966), James Kavanaugh's A MODERN PRIEST LOOKS AT HIS OUTDATED CHURCH (1967), and Ralph MacInerney's bestselling novel, THE PRIEST (1973). And there were also J.F. Powers's classic novels of the Church in the 1950s, MORTE D'URBAN (1967) and WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN (1988). Or more recently, from across the pond, there is British theologian John Cornwell's starkly moving memoir, SEMINARY BOY (2006). And there is Canadian writer Linden McIntyre's THE BISHOP'S MAN (2010). By now I'm sure you get the idea. I'm still looking for - and reading - all these books about the Church, and how it has changed.

SEMINARY was Paul Hendrickson's first book. Since then there have been a few more, much-honored and award-winning books, in fact. His most recent is HEMINGWAY'S BOAT (2011), which was a national bestseller. I think I want to read that one. But for me SEMINARY will always be my favorite Paul Hendrickson book. I loved reading it. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A most important Paul Hendrickson read if anyone wants to know more about the man who writes such great biographical material such as his latest, Hemingway's Boat. I wrote a review of Seminary: A Search here if anyone is interested in knowing more:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/THE-HOLIEST-GROUND-PAUL-KNOWS ( )